City’s incredible accusation of prejudice is an almighty slur
LeT us go back to Friday lunchtime and the spark for the latest instalment of this increasingly festering rivalry between Manchester City and Liverpool.
Jurgen Klopp had finished the broadcast section of his press conference and had moved on to taking questions from newspapers. With so many demands on his time, Liverpool’s manager could only speak for six minutes and 30 seconds.
First came an enquiry about Virgil van Dijk, the next was centred on Darwin Nunez. Finally, Klopp was asked the following question: ‘ When you signed your new contract in April, you said City wouldn’t stop developing — what do you do to keep pace?’
‘You will not like the answer,’ Klopp replied. ‘ Nobody can compete with City in that. You have the best team in the world and you put in the best striker on the market. No matter what it costs you just do it.
‘ I know City will not like it. Nobody will like it. You’ve asked the question but you know the answer. What does Liverpool do? We cannot act like them. It is not possible. There are three clubs in world football who can do what they want financially. It’s legal and everything, fine, but they can do what they want.
‘We have to look at it (and say), “We need that and we have to look here and make it younger, and here a prospect”. And you (try to) compete with them. It is not a problem for me, it’s like it is.
‘Now at Newcastle somebody (sporting director Dan Ashworth) said, “There is no ceiling for this club”. Yes! he is right! he is absolutely right. There is no ceiling for Newcastle. Congratulations. But some other clubs have ceilings.’
That scene needs to be explained in detail and Klopp’s answer needs to be digested. For it is from those words that the path led yesterday to City doubling down with the accusation that the comments were ‘borderline xenophobic’.
It is staggering, an insulting and preposterous deduction, and Liverpool are rightly furious. All legal avenues are being explored and it has taken some effort from City to change the narrative of what was a spellbinding game of football to something altogether unexpected and unedifying.
how did we get here? In terms of a timeline, everything blew up when Phil Foden’s goal was disallowed in the 54th minute. Pep Guardiola, a simmering coil of emotional energy, unravelled with the frustration of VAR and began to engage in a back and forth with the Anfield crowd.
Initially, it all seemed good fun. Guardiola was laughing and almost theatrically waved for more noise as Klopp did the same. It was pantomime stuff, something you would laugh about afterwards, but then some idiots ruined it all by throwing coins at City’s manager.
It was cowardly and mindless and Liverpool were appalled. When these people are identified, they will not be welcome back in Anfield. Good riddance.
But Liverpool fans were not the only ones misbehaving and all through the game, the boorish drone from the away section was provocative — ‘always the victims, it’s never your fault’ and ‘ murderers’, chants about the dark days of hillsborough and heysel.
After the match, Guardiola confirmed objects had been thrown at him. Liverpool published a statement condemning the incendiary chants and the graffiti daubed on the walls of the away section concourse.
That should have been the end of it, but no. Late on sunday, word began to circulate that City were formulating a reply of their own. It was so outlandish that it required a considerable stretch of the imagination that someone could actually come up with it.
In the Manchester Evening News, however, it was there. City didn’t condone the chants but believed strongly that the rhetoric from Klopp had added an unnecessary level of spice to a fixture that was already highly charged. That was the club’s guidance.
Now let’s just break this down. how has Klopp explaining why Liverpool cannot keep pace with the way City invest (he’s right, by the way — did you notice £100million Jack Grealish among the unused substitutes?) become a trigger for chanting about an incident where 96 people were unlawfully killed in 1989? Read that back again to take in the enormity.
‘We know the impact such behaviour has on the families, survivors and all those associated with such disasters,’ Liverpool said.
Who was comfortable at City’s executive level for the communications department to circulate that message? Which one of them actually believed it? If anyone does, they are a disgrace. And they should also have the decency to come out and own it.
It is crucial those questions are answered because a dangerous agenda is being driven. You don’t need a vivid imagination to appreciate how tense the next meeting between these sides will be.
Worse was to come. City doubled down through the day and were comfortable with the message that what Klopp had said ahead of the contest was fuelled by ‘borderline xenophobia’.
Klopp overstepped the mark during his side’s breathless 1-0 win, when he harangued the match
officials to such an extent that he was sent off, but to have him down as the catalyst for chants and preposterous briefings is a new low.
City are right to have had some grievances with Liverpool down the years. They have never forgotten how Merseyside Police failed to make any arrests in 2018 after their bus was attacked before the Champions League quarter-final at Anfield.
It was appalling but nobody was more enraged than Klopp, who called his own fans ‘idiots’. he will be disgusted, again, that City’s bus was damaged as it left the stadium on sunday.
These clubs loathe each other but this felt like a line crossed. Klopp has his faults but to imply he has prejudices is a slur of almighty proportions. It is no wonder legal teams are now involved.
IF Manchester City genuinely could, as Jurgen Klopp believes, do what they want, then Harry Kane would be their striker — as would erling Haaland.
The fact is City did not do as they wanted over Kane, did not offer Tottenham the astronomical sum that would have made Kane’s transfer impossible to refuse. even on Haaland, they waited until his release clause was activated and bought him for a bargain £51.2million.
Doing what they wanted might have involved going a year earlier when Borussia Dortmund did not want to sell and paying double, or treble, ensuring they could not be gazumped by real Madrid, or others. So City were prudent, as well as patient.
Setting Sunday’s match up as the evil empire against the noble, straight-shooting underdogs may have added to the febrile atmosphere inside Anfield, may have added to the coins, the graffiti, the vile chanting, the absence of boundaries on both sides — and that’s not to knock what was largely a cracking atmosphere — but that is only part of the problem with what Klopp said on the eve of the game.
The bottom line is, he was wrong. City do not and cannot act as they please. No club can. There are rules regarding financial fair play. There is also good practice in the transfer market. City now adhere to both.
The league table for net spend in the 2022-23 season may surprise. Which team is bottom? it’s not Leicester City, who are widely agreed to have starved Brendan rodgers of investment this summer. it’s Manchester City, because they sold three key players — raheem Sterling, Gabriel Jesus and oleksandr Zinchenko — to make room for Haaland and, to a lesser extent, Kalvin phillips.
So they didn’t do as they wanted. They did what was smart. identified players who were coming to the end of their contracts, or were expendable within the project, and cashed in as a way of supporting their investment.
The idea that Manchester City are not confined by the same financial pressures as other clubs underplays the consistent intelligence of the trades made by pep Guardiola and director of football Txiki Begiristain.
Michael edwards, the former head of recruitment at Liverpool, was rightly afforded enormous credit for building the team who won the club its first premier League title. Yet the signings that ultimately made the difference were, at the time, the world’s most expensive defender virgil van Dijk and the most expensive goalkeeper, Alisson.
The narrative has since developed that whereas edwards was a bargain- hunting genius, Guardiola and Begiristain are merely the fortunate beneficiaries of unlimited state wealth — even though they won the title last season with a starting Xi that often failed to include a recognised striker, and a left back who cost £1.7m from russian side FC Ufa.
And, obviously, City’s ambition is to win genuine titles, not triumph in some accountants’ net spend table, but if one existed, they wouldn’t be doing badly at all. Across the last five years, City would be 12th, Liverpool ninth.
obviously, it’s better the nearer the bottom. How is this calculated? Take every club’s net spend each season, add it together, then divide by five.
Manchester United are top, with an average of £105.4m — and what a fabulous return they’ve had on that, by the way — followed by Arsenal (£ 83.4m), Chelsea (£78.6m), West Ham (£65.8m) and Newcastle (£59.3m). Liverpool’s average net spend is £36.3m, Manchester City’s £30.6m. So, hardly dissimilar.
on wages, too. Across the five seasons from 2016-17 to 2020-21 — no later figures have been released by any club — City spent 60 per cent of their revenue on wages, Liverpool 61 per cent, although City’s wage bill is 8.1 per cent higher, £309m to £284m.
And, no, those numbers don’t include Haaland; then again nor do they include Mo Salah’s new deal, the most lucrative in Liverpool’s history.
So, if City could do what they wanted, they are missing a trick, what with being outspent by West Ham. Yet that’s the myth of the narrative Klopp perpetuates. He said there were three clubs in world football who were beyond limitations. He also named Newcastle, and we can presume the third is paris Saint-Germain.
So they are all lumped together, again, the Arab states; just as they were when UeFA fined City
City versus Liverpool is not the evil empire against the noble underdogs
and PSG exactly the same for FFP rule breaches, even though their cases were far from identical. Just as they were when in 2019 Javier Tebas, president of la liga, said PSG and City distorted the transfer market, when PSG had Neymar and Kylian Mbappe in their ranks, and City’s record acquisition was Riyad Mahrez for £60m.
Whether wilfully or otherwise, Klopp also misinterpreted the comments of dan Ashworth, the sporting director of Newcastle, who spoke of there being no glass ceiling at his club. ‘he’s absolutely right,’ Klopp said. ‘There’s no ceiling for Newcastle.
‘ Congratulations — some clubs have ceilings.’
yet Ashworth was not talking about a ceiling on spending, as Klopp implied. he was talking about there being no limit on Newcastle’s ambition.
In spending terms, of course there is a glass ceiling at Newcastle. That’s why they’ve appointed Ashworth to work the transfer market and improve youth development, rather than just phoning daniel levy and asking him how much he wants for Kane.
That’s why in the same interview, Ashworth raised the possibility of selling arguably their best s i g n i n g, Bruno
Guimaraes, to raise money for the next round of recruitment.
While Manchester United paid £70m for Casemiro, who will be 31 in February, Newcastle shrewdly gave £30m less for 24- year- old Guimaraes, his Brazilian counterpart and now coveted by Real Madrid as his replacement.
So there is a ceiling for Newcastle, whose owners have the reserves to tell Madrid to go away and find their own rising stars, but cannot due to the restrictions of financial fair play.
FFP is the glass ceiling, and who pushes for its ever-more stringent enforcement? Clubs like liverpool, to protect their position within the elite. It is a protectionist stance, and always has been.
The idea that the established european elite are in some way the rebel upstarts against PSG, Manchester City and Newcastle is perhaps the biggest con of all.
Klopp has done a brilliant job. his club is superbly run
from bottom to top, yet liverpool are not the underdogs here. This summer, they paid £ 85m for a striker, darwin Nunez, who has scored just four goals to haaland’s 20, and was not in the starting line-up on Sunday.
IN REVERSE, it would be considered the epitome of City doing what they like, if one considers how the transfer of Jack Grealish has been received. The reality is that City have consistently withdrawn from auctions and negotiations for players when they have considered the value is no longer there.
All of these players have then found homes with Premier league rivals: Fred, harry Maguire and Alexis Sanchez went to Manchester United after City withdrew, Marc Cucurella and Kalidou Koulibaly to Chelsea. And it wasn’t that City were bidding for bidding’s sake.
They definitely wanted a left back, but instead of paying Brighton £60m for Cucurella, gave Anderlecht £11m for Sergio Gomez.
Klopp is a populist. he tries to position his club this way, too, even if liverpool have been prime movers behind two of the most unpopular concepts in football history, Project Big Picture and the Super league.
No doubt his disciples lap up the idea that liverpool are in some way disadvantaged, gamely challenging big, bad Manchester City — yet where is the evidence?
liverpool have attained 90plus points in three of the last five seasons, and Klopp has beaten Guardiola more times than any manager in history, including their last three meetings and eight of 18 games since they first locked horns in england. City have won just four of those encounters.
liverpool’s most recent triumph was on Sunday. They were the better side on the day. Not because they do what they want, but because they have the world’s formerly most expensive defender, formerly the most expensive goalkeeper, and an £85m striker who can’t get in the team. The winning goal was converted by Salah, their best- rewarded player ever.
But to put it all down to numbers undervalues the role played by Klopp, and others, just as Klopp’s misdirection distracts us from the achievements of Guardiola and his team.
If it was just about money, anyone could do this.